Headscratchers / Schlock Mercenary

New entries on the bottom. Spoilers abound.

Killer

• Why does nobody act surprised that the story of Killer that the Toughs hear from Rod accords with the version of events that Lady Emily and Chuck tell the rest of the amorphs? There are a variety of explanations that could fit (limitations on surveillance, senility, etc) but nobody even wonders why they had to break up the slave ring by chance, instead of with foreknowledge.
  • Rod and the rest of his species don't pay attention to stuff in the outside too much—he admits outright that even the most interesting thing in centuries only almost tempted him away from meals. It's perfectly plausible that they only heard the propaganda, and didn't bother listening in on Lady Emily's secretmost meetings.
  • Ooorrrr, Rod didn't say because he wanted to watch a 'war'.
  • Maybe I'm missing something, but it was my impression that, until the other amorphs absorbed "Chuck's" memories, nobody else actually knew about the slavery ring.

Robot Sail Ship

• Near the end of the "Board of Accidental Tourism" arc, why exactly do Ceeta and Tagon think that it is a good idea to send the Organic killing Robots to Sol? While they are manifestly incompetent, what exactly do they get by sending the ship there? Why not just teraport them into a star?
  • Because they didn't want to decide to commit genocide, so they decided to throw the problem at someone who likes making those kinds of choices—Xinchub. Which backfired when he was able to spin it into good press.

Annie-Plant Explosions

• In the "Board of Accidental Tourism" arc, we find that the explosion of even a minuscule annie-plant could level a city, or make a volcano erupt. Later on, the much larger plant in Elf's minitank blows right under her, and all it does is take off her feet.
  • Simple. Tanks are expected to come under fire, damaged, etc. Thus, their annie plants have some sort of safety feature to keep a breach from killing the pilot, perhaps directing the blast somewhere else, or something. Also, Elf was wearing armor good against 30th century artillery strikes, which probably helped.
  • The amount of fuel in the annie plant might also be a factor. The uplift robot that caused the volcano to erupt was fully fueled for an expected operating time of roughly five hundred years (though admittedly, it consumed a lot less power than a grav tank).
  • It's pointed out here and elsewhere that an annie plant can be prevented from going supercritical if it's first "stepped down." Presumably, this is an automatic procedure in the event that something starts to go wrong with one of the tanks.
  • Confirmed in "Force Multiplication"; when Max is converting the suborned Tarfeather into a bomb, he specifically orders the robot to disable its annie-plant's step-down protocol.
  • Also, the annie-plants involved have different uses. Yeah, the annie plant in the computer made a big boom, but it was designed to last for centuries. The annie plant in the tank is designed for something that is going to get shot at a lot. The tank's plant is almost certainly designed to not cause an epic explosion if it goes up, because military hardware that blows up cities when it gets damaged is not viable.
  • Also keep in mind that the annie plants are getting blown up by dark matter entity weapons, which consistently create small-scale explosions using whatever weapons system that the dark matter entities like to fire at us baryonic life forms. Those weapons have consistently been shown to blow up annie plants without causing earth-shattering kabooms.
  • Additionally, Sh'vuu was completely killed by his minitank exploding. Elf just got lucky (also, she may have been complying with Der Trihs' order and got ejected just enough to not die).

Tailor

• According to the Toughs' implanted memories, Petey abandoned them to some pirates, or something along those lines. Why doesn't anybody question things when Tagon's new tailorbot gets delivered through TAD? Furthermore, Petey could have made excuses to future!Kevyn to get out of doing this, but apparently, he could tell that nobody would think it strange for an aloof AI who had abandoned its former friends to help give one of them a birthday present? Am I missing something?
  • To my recollection, only the UNS (and the residents of Petey's space-Australia) actually knows Petey can ignore teraport interdiction. Further, only Tagon was party to Tailor's method of arrival, and he's both too bright and not bright enough to question where Tailor came from, especially in the frazzled state he was in at the time. The rest of the crew likely assumed he just went and bought Tailor to get him a new suit as a self-birthday present.
  • The Toughs had their memories changed at the end of Book 9. The Tailor is given to Tagon halfway through Book 10, so of course they remember where he really came from.
  • The Headscratcher isn't about where Tailor came from (General Tagon and future!Kevyn), but rather about how he was delivered: he was teraported directly onboard the Tough's ship, ignoring their TAD (and possibly others, as well). Petey is the only known character capable of ignoring teraport interdiction, but according to the Toughs' implanted memories, Petey is an enemy, and therefore wouldn't be helping to deliver birthday presents. Hence the headscratcher about why no-one questions Tailor's arrival. I mostly concur w/ the above explanation, although the rest of the Toughs do know that it was a gift from General Tagon, not a self-birthday present.
• The Tough's TAD was probably not the problem. Karl could've leaned on any of Tagon's crew to help him get teraport authorization. Petey was needed to punch through Credomar's TAD, which as we'd just seen didn't have that feature, having to be turned off completely in order to allow teraports. But Tagon slept through that particular foxtrot and he barely skims his reports, and none of the others actually saw Tailor teraport. Even Tagon was barely awake for that.

Credomar Antimatter

• Okay look at this comics: http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20081125.html A group is making antimatter weapons. Fine. To get antimatter you need a huge amount of energy. True. Their power source is... antimatter. That has to be a huge thermodynamics fail or a huge economics fail.
  • ... "Annie" plants don't use antimatter. Annie plants work by annihilating neutronium, and are essentially giant mass-to-energy converters.
  • When antimatter meets matter they are both converted into energy... to convert neutronium into energy, you use anti neutronium (unless they have some magical way to do so in the strip without using antimatter).
  • They do have a magical way. All we know about the process is that it involves gravitics. Presumably this vagueness is to avoid giving wiseacre tropers like us any specific targets. (I can think of one method, though: collapse bits of the fuel mass all the way to singularities, then capture the energy release when they evaporate into Hawking radiation.)
  • They do indeed have a magical way. They take in matter and compress it against the neutronium, or manipulate the gravitics to allow a very small chunk of the neutronium to explosively vaporize into energy. Either process will release a butt-ton of energy.
  • Ordinary matter is compressed gravitically until it becomes neutronium, which is used to fuel the annie plant. They then use some magical technology to annihilate this neutronium (perhaps by converting neutrons into antineutrons). In any case, "annihilation" implies a total conversion.
  • Either way, the short version is that they don't use antimatter as a fuel source.
  • Antimatter or not, the energy was sealed inside a giant half-kilometer nigh unbreakable sphere with no access. So they would still have to siphon off power to create "free" antimatter that they could use for weapons.
  • Weapons grade antimatter may well be in a different form to fuel grade; compare and contrast real-world civilian nuclear reactor fuel with weapon grade plutonium, for example. If you've got easy gravity control, suspending naked, unionised antimatter in a vacuum is dead easy but requires the presence of gravitic devices... confining it in fullerenes could make it relatively safe to handle but might not be a trivial thing to do.
  • Remember that raw anti-matter is a very inefficient fuel source: half the energy is lost as neutrinos. Even if an annie plant is converting neutronium to energy, it could easily be doing so in a much more efficient way than simple anti-matter reactions.
  • Annie-plants use no anti-matter, only normal neutronium and gravitic wizardry. Deny this if you can find a single reference to annie-plants consuming antimatter.

The smell of Boomex

• Why didn't Schlock remember that his contact had smelt of Boomex?
  • I got the impression that he was careful enough to avoid the stuff—until he loaded that aircar he gave the ellie with the stuff. That's what Schlock smelled, not the older batch. But, the stuff in the aircar was from the same batch (that's why he blew it up in the first place), so they smelled the same.

Non-baryonic reaction to teraporting

• The baryonic people committed genocide of the dark matter people over a form of transportation. They can communicate. The baryonic people know how to stop teraporting.
  • A: If you mean by teraporting, the strip's only said it "pollutes their space," not "kills them." It's never been made clear just how much damage the teraport was doing. B: If you mean by the attack in the core, the only Pa'anuri who were killed were soldiers sent to ensure the destruction of the Milky Way; they're from Andromeda, remember? C: The F'sherl-gaani did stop teraporting. The Pa'anuri responded with a time bomb, a hundred thousand years before the humans started again.
  • Actually, terraports do kill them. That's how the Core War was fought. The point about the time bomb still stands, though.
  • Teraports only kill them when the density of teraports-per-volume-of-space gets very, very high. One large teraports might annoy them; a blanket of teraport as area-denial can kill them. So normal transport just annoys them, for which they attempt to kill everybody.
  • Don't forget that their word for baryonic matter is "ANNOYING."
  • The moral side of the Core War is addressed by Petey in this strip. He explains that while they will attack the Pa'anuri unilaterally, the hostilities technically started when the Pa'anuri planned to destroy the galaxy, and the baryonic life-forms will simply announce that they have finally noticed.
  • Teraporting is annoying. Teraport area denial fields kill. Kind of the same way a water balloon hitting you is just annoying, but filling an entire room with water can kill you.
  • What's amusing is that the entire thing was addressed in a single strip that both explained why they were at war and that the Paan'uri plotted the genocide of an entire galaxy. So the very issue that OP brought up was addressed in the same strip that it was introduced in.

Doctor and Reverend's marriage

• In recent story - why Doctor and Reverend thinks they are not married while they were by captain, whose parents were ortodox las veganists? Sure it was tactical marriage but still should be honored. (PS. I'm not surprised why they cry as many parts of memories are... radically different.
  • Their memories were wiped - being married in jail wouldn't jive with the cover story, after all. All they remember is the fake wedding. This might turn out to be a plot point. It is, at the very least, effective use of irony.
  • The source for the reset memories is Schlock, and most of what Schlock rammed into his eyeball was dedicated to "this is what's really happening" and "eat this specific asshole". They were even able to jam Petey, at least to a degree, meaning that about the only person who could actually tell them that they were married in jail would be Admiral Manyara Emm, who is...unlikely to provide relationship advice at any point in the foreseeable future, put it that way.
  • They were able to flag the false memories, but not restore the missing ones (except for Kevyn, because Petey made backups of his brain). So the fancy wedding was flagged as fake (by having the colour drained out), but there's no memory whatsoever of what happened while they were in Emm's clutches.

Petey's Ghosts

• In regards to Petey's ghosts, how come nobody realized that the engineers who built him could have intentionally designed the sewage system to produce haunting sounds if you run air through them?
  • Because there's no reason for the engineers to do that.
  • I think his point was that there is a non-astronomical chance that an engineer with a weird sense of humor had rigged the sewage system - Thus preventing Petey's insanity. It's a good point. I assume the answer is Rule of Funny.
  • Actually, Petey is embarrassed that he got caught in a recursion, and Kevyn mentions that its somewhat common for super-minds. In other words, there was an easy answer, but he couldn't stop calculating the ridiculous improbabilities long enough to think of it.
  • It was always my assumption that Petey's crazy-spell was the cause of the voices in the pipes, not the other way around. Think about it: something happened to cause the mutineers to abandon ship, something which also caused them (or Petey himself) to destroy the ship's original AI control switch, since Kevyn mentioned when they first bought the Post-Dated Check Loan that the switch was destroyed. It makes a lot more sense than random noises: being ordered to exterminate his own crew causes Petey's mind to fracture. The broken part takes control of the air line attached to the plumbing, and uses it to create a disembodied voice to terrorize the mutineers. They eventually abandon the now insane warship. The "sane" part of Petey's mind spends the intervening years thinking about ghosts, until he's rebooted and ordered to repress the entire incident.
  • Alternatively, it actually was just haunted. Interestingly, if Petey had just accepted that there were ghosts, and looked for a way to deal with that, rather than putting a lot of effort into finding a solution that would let him continue to think ghosts weren't real, he might never have gone insane in the first place.

Ramifications of the Battle at the Core

• Why doesn't the battle at the core seem to have any long-term ramifications? "Everyone" was there, and the battle was said to have 35% casualties - even assuming those were mostly on evacuated "expendable" ships like the Peacemaker, unlikely since Petey didn't evacuate the Peacemaker until asked to, that must have been a massive loss of materiel. If only the Sol system forces managed such massive deployment, that's even worse, since that must have hugely upset the balance of power both within the UNS and between it and other governments. And yet there doesn't seem to be any real aftermath other than the Fleetmind's formation.
  • It was actually more like 100% casualties, if you count the fact that every shipmind allowed into the Fleetmind refused to leave it at the end. However, nobody sent more than about half their navy, and everybody got their ships stolen, so the balance of power is intact.
  • Except for the Ob'enn who didn't help out. But presumably the Fleetmind continues Petey's work at keeping them contained.
  • It is extremely likely that the Fleetmind is, as Petey is the dominant force within the AI collective. There's a reason why everyone refers to the Fleetmind as "Petey."
  • Also, anyone who tried to take advantage of the instabilities caused by the Fleetmind's formation will very quickly discover the Fleetmind's capacity for intervention in a spectacular and decisive manner, right before being drafted to help fight in Andromeda. The Fleetmind tends their backyard, after all.

Attack on Shufgar's Ship

• The attack on Shufgar's ship always bugged me, but I could never figure out why until I took a closer read. There's a couple of points here:

1. Tagon's Toughs performed multiple sweeps (at least five, probably closer to ten) of the entire ship during the eight hours they were present. During the sweeps, they removed most of the spying stuff, meaning that Shufgar wasn't able to monitor everywhere on the ship anymore. So how did he know when the sweeps had stopped and it was safe to start inserting troops?
2. Both Tagon and Kevyn knew that the ship was probably a trap, to the point where they were considering torching the entire ship, so why did they keep the ship fully operational? With teraport, they could have disabled any system without doing any structural damage to the ship.
3. Speaking of teraporting, why weren't the toughs on-board Shufgar's ship simply teraported out by the Touch-and-Go when they first discovered the teraport cages? Or at least regrouped using teraports? They have the ultimate mobility advantage, but don't use teraporting at all during the fight.
4. Finally, how did Shufgar's ship escape from the touch-and-go to be destroyed by Kevyn's epaulet? There were still terapedoes attached to the hull.
   • Taking these one at a time... Shufgar may have simply chosen a good time to start putting troops back on board, or he may have still had spy eyes available. They hadn't managed to shut down the teraport cages, after all, so some things were still hidden. It's also probable that the ship still had an active TAD up the whole time they were searching it, or else they could simply have ported it back to their employers, so there's that. As far as escaping, I don't think it did: Shufgar and company simply used the teraport cages to evacuate, and abandoned the ship where it was, because it was no longer safe.
   • Then why not disable the Teraport on Shufgar's ship? Deactivating TA Ds not under your control seems like it'd be standard procedure, and the Toughs had plenty of time.
   • Oh also, checking again: it appears that Shufgar only started sending troops back after the first teraport cage node was knocked out, so presumably he knew it was now or never to capture some prisoners.

Danita

• What happened to Danita after the Oisri incident? She's probably the most valuable witness to everything that happened there, and the best evidence at the same time. But she seems to drop out of the comic once Tagii is neutralized. Logically, since they teraported to Parnassus Dom right after, she's probably in Petey's custody, but no mention is made of it, which is strange considering how important she is now.
  • Petey's debriefing her, and probably reversing the super-soldier boosts. She'll come back into the story later, when she becomes relevant.
  • On a second read, it's implied Petey supplied the Gavs with the nannies, meaning he knows how to work with them. He has presumably removed the soldier's mind from Danita so that she is safe and sane again, and is now interrogating the soldier.
  • She appears to have shown up again as a researcher inside of Eina-Afa, arguing with another researcher about the name of the "Ithsmus Galatica". She still has the super-soldier armored body for some reason (maybe she decided to keep it and be bulletproof?) and there are no indications as to her state of mind, in terms of Kowalski still being in there (which is doubtful if she got any help from Petey).

Teraport Energy

• The teraport, and I am not talking about the tear apart thing since that is discussed in the comic itself. I am talking about how the early version at least powers itself. It is supposed to take random molecules from the thing it is transporting and converting it to energy. http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2000-07-16 Think about that for a minute. This is horrifying even before we learn about all the micro and nano stuff that could be disrupted by this. A more general fear could be serious material degradation of the hull or the anniplants after several ports. Scary, right. Now look at the last panel of the comic linked to. This one implies that the random sampling of molecules chose full items. Let that sink in as you remember that the ship is missing 1800kg of mass, and that the sampling of mass was uncontrolled, and the something in the last panel could easily be exchanged for someone.
  • That was probably partially because the teraport in question wasn't actually intended as a starship drive- Kevyn had been doing small-scale tests using it. For those, using a function that picks random bits of the cargo to fuel the teraport. Actual starship-drive teraports presumably use a non-random function that converts designated "teraport fuel" to power the teraport.
  • And then to make it worse, in this comic part of the mass converted is suggested to be in a characters memory centre.
  • I just thought that he was distracted by the 'port.
  • It's implied later that ship-based teraports use the annie-plants for energy, like the rest of the ships' systems. It doesn't have to be random, Kevyn just thought that would be a better idea. Remember: Mad Scientist.
  • Then again, when Breya was considering not forwarding the teraport data to Xinchub, but doing it anyway because she didn't want to sacrifice a whole ship "to be rid of the fat man", using the fat man's, uh, mass to power the 'port would save everyone a lot of grief in the future.
  • She was giving the teraport data to him, and he was teraporting himself. Even if she was teraporting his ship using her power, she couldn't use his mass to power it.
  • Moreover, she wasn't giving him a design for a teraport, she was giving him authorization credentials for the one he already had, to escape the Gatekeepers' interdiction system.
• It's easy to underestimate just how much energy is stored in matter. A perfect conversion of matter to energy (which it's implied the teraport uses) releases 90 terajoules (25 Gigawatt-hours) per gram of matter. It would take an uncountable number of teraports to even begin to result in any measurable degradation to anything.

VDA Teraport Test

• Way back in January 14 2005 Kevyn and Ennesby were using the VDA to test the teraport since it had changed after the core generator had activated (they didn't know that yet). They perform 3 million tests and Kevyn asks "Do I want to know what odds you beat when none of the torpedoes killed anyone?" Now, originally I just thought it was a throw away joke. Given the size of space, Ennesby could just run the test lightyears away from anybody. Then it hit me, to make the tests work, Ennesby had to perform the tests inside controlled space where there are systems to give the torpedoes exact position (like our GPS). When they where hiding out earlier, Ennesby mentions that he doesn't have access to such systems when outside inhabited space. That means he ran those tests INSIDE a populated solar system. 3 million tests.
  • Even if it's limited to inhabited systems (not at all certain, the VDA nodes could ID their location by looking at stars, or similar) the odds of them hitting anything were ludicrously minimal. No matter how you define "solar system" ours is well over 99.9999999999999% empty space (Literally, no hyperbole). Out of the remaining fraction of a fraction of a percent, the vast majority (over 99% again) is the sun. In essence: Ennesby could've teraported a few quadrillion times without any measurable risk of hitting anything else.
  • Or they could have used the rest of the array for positioning. The nodes just need to know their relative position and speed^note not hard to do : they just need to ping each other, measure the response time, and do some three-dimensional triangulation to function exactly like a GPS network, except much more precise by virtue of having much more nodes. Then the test could be run by teraporting the torpedoes one at a time, or even one percent at a time.

Dr. Lazarus

• When Dr. Lazarus was killed, the medical hologram stated that it couldn't revive him because his brain had been destroyed. But later, it reveals that it has a dump of his memories. Did it ever explain why it didn't just use that as a backup?
  • There seems to be a distinction between raw data and the actual ego of the person, as demonstrated when Kowalski is downjacking into Mako (he refers to it as a selfstream). You'll note that the hologram describes the doctor as a separate person; "I have his memories." It's like Tagii mentioning that she has access to TAG's gestalt; she is not TAG and can not choose to become TAG, but she can learn from his memories like watching a documentary.
  • I just read this and this comic more carefully, which might lead to another explanation in the future. Though how he would have left his grave without Doyt's intervention remains to be seen.

Toughs wormgate usage

• One of the key plot point of the series is that the gatekeepers used to control the entire galaxy through their wormgate network, by copying and interrogating everyone who went through. One of the primary purposes of this was to suppress teraport technology. Except, since someone did develop teraport technology, that means that that person, Kevyn, didn't a wormgate since the idea came to him. Except he's part of a squad of mercenaries, which would normally be travelling around a fair bit. Did the Toughs really just sit in a single star system (a fairly peaceful one even, given that they end up guarding pop icons rather than blowing things up) for the entire time it took Kevyn to come up with, develop and do initial testing of the teraport?
  • Looking at the first month-plus of archives, I can actually see very clearly how Kevyn managed to stay under their radar. Whether it qualifies as Fridge Brilliance or WMG I don't know, but:
    1. Almost at the beginning of the comic, Tagon's Toughs are subjected to a hostile takeover by Breya Andreyasn.
    2. The only contract since the takeover was escorting the New Sync Boys on their tour, a contract which went wrong immediately thanks to Brad and Schlock's brainstorm.
    3. Kevyn apparently joined the crew with Breya, and moved into his new lab during their first contract.
    4. In the second strip after the Teraport is introduced, Kevyn says he told Breya weeks ago he needed volunteers to test his device ... right before Schlock enters the room.
    5. Speaking of things going wrong immediately: before they had a chance to leave orbit, the former New Sync Boys AI 'borrowed' the computers required to make the ship go.
       
       Putting all of this together, it looks to me like Kevyn was land-locked until Breya 'recruited' a mercenary company full of 'volunteers' to test his invention^* which says something heartwarming about her confidence in his technical genius, and by sheer coincidence (which, naturally, is what it would take) they never had a mission involving wormgates until after the teraport had already proved itself.
       
       Plus, whatever the Gatekeepers were doing to keep the teraport suppressed was clearly not sufficient to prevent the completion of the prerequisite research and development.
• All this does still leave the question of how the Gatekeepers managed to suppress the tech for millennia if their manipulation was that easy to bypass. In Para's words, Kevyn's work was [https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2008-04-06 derivative], so the Gatekeepers not only failed to suppress crucial research into wormhole properties, but also failed to monitor queries for that research (as for example the UNS did for [queries relating to longevity research](https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2007-12-03). They must have gotten complacent over the years - or maybe some of them wanted it to happen.

Sacrificing Neosynchronicity

• Why not teraport more fuel to Neosynchronicity, allowing her to fire the second NUSPI shot without blowing up? There were at least two battleplates present, and since Neosynchronicity was saving the city they surely would have obliged her if she'd asked.
  • Probably because they were in a big rush. Saving the city takes higher precedence than a single spacecraft.
  • One phone call, an authentication handshake and a moment's effort. They probably could have done it in the time it took them to evacuate Neosynchronicity.
  • When you're in a rush, the smartest solution doesn't always occur to you. Also, for all we know, it might be dangerous to refuel the gun when it's already warmed up and spinning. Another thing to note is that they were very worried about the political implications about having a weapon that cannot be defended against. With the secret out in the open, they probably decided it was best to let them believe the weapon died with the ship.

Why don't the Toughs have any expendable robot troops/corpsmen?

• We know that they use semi-sentient drones for other purposes (including missiles), and they already have designs for bots like that used in fabbers. Why not send a few along with away teams, as expendable hands? Would have been really handy if you're faced with, say, a dying comrade riddled with unexploded ordnance, or a giant pipe bomb than needs to be manually detonated. The only time we've ever seen them do that was when the PDCL tried to dissect that Gatekeeper missile.
  • Probably for the same reason Star Trek away teams keep getting killed. To maintain suspense. Also probably for the same reason they don't just have AIs do everything.
  • Possibly also because humans (and other human-sized organic sophonts) have generally proven harder to hack and suborn than human-sized robots. Notable exceptions being redhack and the taterhack, which used suites of very illegal nanites, and Phil and his warrior-drones, which was a hivemind capable of wireless communication (and by agents of the All-Star, a heavy-hitter tech-wise).
  • Any robot capable of independent action in combat would need a fairly advanced AI. That would make it a sentient creature, and therefore no longer expendable.
  • Given the moral issue of full-fledged AIs in combat, the closest thing to "expendable robot troops" considered acceptable in the setting is SI-controlled semi-autonomous weaponry. We first saw such devices when the concept of "synthetic intelligence" as distinct from AI was first introduced - ship-to-ship missiles use SIs, making them basically expendable robot troops on the STS scale. Later on we saw SIs used for infantry-scale weapons with the paul-drones in the Oisri arc, and later with the Esspees' soshikos, the M3 Taters in Dom Atlantis, and the fragsuits first seen in Mandatory Failure. So "expendable robot troops" exist; the only question is why we didn't see them on the infantry level before Oisri.
  • Out of universe the answer is obviously that the author didn't think of them, but in-universe they are presumably expensive. Until the company joined the Neofans, they were stuck pretty firmly in Perpetual Poverty (and were mostly fighting low-level enemies who also wouldn't have the money for expensive SI drones). The fragsuits in particular are brand-new technology that take quite a bit of time to get used to.

Why bother with the Pa'anuri Protocol?

• So battleplates have a way to "run silent" and become invisible to Pa'anuri by powering down all their gravitics. Okay. But when we see it deployed at Oisri, there was only one Pa'anuri present, and it's well-understood by then how to kill Pa'anuri with teraport-denial fields. Why doesn't Morokweng just swat the thing and go back to chasing down Touch-and-Go, rather than giving up 99% of its combat power in order to hide from it? Granted, your enemy being eaten by a monster is fun to watch, but still.
  • We don't actually know how long they take to die, that could factor into it. Battle plates aren't exactly expendable.
  • The Touch and Go was also there to provide a distraction. Whether the plan was to let her do damage to the Pa'anuri and then finish it off after or just escape in the confusion, Tagii derailed it by ramming him instead.
  • Killing the Pa'anuri requires spreading around teraport field projectors, which wouldn't be possible with teraport interdiction from Tagii.

What happened to the Neoafan Freehold?

• The Tough's authority to exploit Eina-afa came from their being agents of the government set up by the insectoid natives, the reborn Oafa race, and ancient Oafan memories incarnated in new bodies. When digitized ancient Oafa are released and lay claim everyone acts like the Toughs had just looted what they thought was an abandoned ruin all on their lonesome and are solely legally responsible, and none of the above have even been mentioned.
  • The story is of course still ongoing, but Tagon did point out that Putzho and Iafa should have negotiated terms before letting the Oafans out (they were in a hurry due to Chinook's madness). So it's not necessarily that everyone thinks the Toughs are thieves, but the Oafans think that, and they are fully capable of taking back everything they believe is theirs.
  • Now that the story has come to an end, it became pretty clear in hindsight.
    • The Neoafan Freehold was basically sitting on the largest known chunk of the universe's exceedingly valuable Phlebotinum before the Worldforge ruin was located late in Book 16. And to quote Massey, having that kind of money means you need to have a major military power watching your back.
    • Said military power was Chinook, who also happened to have enough Long Guns to enforce her will on the whole Milky Way, but was apparently too nice to do so.
    • Chinook went mad due to a combination of grief from personal losses and logic bomb unintentionally left in her systems triggered by said grief, forgotten by their previous inhabitant. She was contained before she could further degrade and instigate the Long Gun apocalypse on the galaxy by the mind-uploaded ancient Oafans, true owners of the place, hitherto imprisoned and undiscovered in the information world of the place, in a moment of literal Deux ex Machina courtesy of Putzho.
    • The ancient Oafans took back what was rightfully theirs, including most of what was Neoafan Freehold, and was instantly revealed to be a great power with a capital G. They were nonetheless nice enough to not enforce their will too much on the galaxy, except apparently disclaiming the ill-advised trades and gifts the Neoafan Freehold made, especially those regarding the Toughs (and apparently "I really wanted to call them friend" Petey, too).

Laz- 3 death and backups

• A character suffered a Laz-3 death (brain destroyed, in-body backups damaged but mostly intact) and lost 1% of her lifetime memory. Another character suffered Laz-5 death (completely vaporized, restore from an icebox backup) and lost no memories from before he was last backed up. Why not use Laz-5 backups to fill in what a Laz-3 or Laz-4 patient loses?
  • To argue the point, do we know the Laz-5 death^note I'm assuming it's Tagon, when he 'walked the bomb' didn't lose any memories? We saw conversations for both of them. One was after revival, and the doctor was doing the psychological check-up in person, in meat-space; and we saw the "1%" being dropped like a bombshell in person. For the other case, it was done in A.I.-space, we didn't see any figures mentioned on screen (apart from saying "there's some stuff you won't remember - because it comes after the backup we're making you from"), and the evaluation was done by someone that clearly said "well, go ahead and treat yourself like a different person, to 'preserve the illusion of free will'."
  • Which also explains why the Laz-5 backups aren't used...it would destroy the illusion of free will.
    • There's technically a 'problem'— the Laz-5's are kept. And they have been used at least once: in Tagon's case. Also, technically, when Petey helped restore Schlock. They've been used on screen, so far, only when the originals have died, so in "free will terms" it's a continuance, rather than a straightforward clone/copy.

Zoojack creatures

• Who were those creatures on the station where Elf lost her legs? And what was that station used for anyway? Them speaking Galstandard only made it more complicated.
  • WMG here, but they could be the original species, offshot of which became Ganni. Apparently, made as a servant race, but later revolted, and kept alive due to some unspecified deal with Ganni. In that case Galstandard was originally their language, and later was made common.

Giant squid

• What's the deal with Petey and that cephalopod he requested as payment? Is it a Celeschuul native or what?
  • It's a prototype genetically engineered uplifted squid, probably designed to interact with the Celeschuul in some way. It wasn't anything until that mad scientist printed it out with all the other animals, and then Petey realized he could use it.

Eina-Afa light

• What is the light source inside Eina-Afa? Annie plants were down during the wait period, it would take one hell of any other energy source to illuminate that volume, and the can itself is definitely opaque.
  • Probably solar panels.
  • A better question might be asked as to why Eina-Afa's interior is not in a state of perpetual twilight, as one would probably get with multiple tens of Earth's atmospheric depth everywhere between spindle and surface - Though its Oafan builders may have compensated for such things, simply by adjusting the spectrum mix of the lighting.

Fake rebellion

• Who was sponsoring the riot on Earth? Celeschuul, Emm's faction, or the All-Star? These guns came from the same facility on Urtheep that meddled with the All-Star.
  • All evidence points to the Schuul. They were interfering even earlier, in the Mall-Cop Command arc, though the Toughs accidentally foiled their plans by being competent instead of violent thugs. The All-Star only got involved with Urtheep later, when a random ship stumbled upon them.

All-Star objective

• What was the actual objective of the All-Star agents? End the current cycle since it's already compromised? Or just torch every trace of the All-Star, with the current civ as collateral damage? And what is Putzho's mission? He cannot be an ambassador, since he cannot relay back to the All-Star. So, just assistant-of-all-trades to the parties he deems beneficial to the All-Star's goals?
  • Putzo's crew (and the other ship) were pulled in because one of them found out something connected to the All-Star, and with the other ship trying to find them. The All-Star had some sort of mission at the "return docks", that the 'agents' apparently decided to escalate on their own (into a "first strike"); Putzo was allowed to return to meat-space to cut the "first strike" short, with a warning that he wouldn't be allowed to return to the All-Star. The guesswork becomes: did the "first strike" team escalate (under someone's orders) just to get Putzo back out? Did someone know that he would be able to help with Chinook? Does he have a hidden transmitter back to the All-Star? (Not quite like Sorlie's, since she had to participate in putting it in.)

Finding and connecting to the All-Star

• Where'd this company get up-to-date coordinates of the All-Star, as well as knowledge about its nature and connection protocols?
  • They found it by sheer luck, but they didn't actually know anything about it. The All-Star connected with them, not the other way around.

Gatekeeper archive

• How old is the Gatekeepers' archive? Is it speaking about many Galcivilisation falls as a personal witness or just from archeological knowledge? And were the Ganni aware of All-Star? Ulaque sounded like he previously discussed the gate project with them.
  • Personal, I think it's no older than Gatekeeper civilization (unless the Gatekeepers claimed an older archive as theirs). That, plus accessing various government's versions of Wikipedia would allow it to assume its "I know too much and am now the center of the universe through observation" quirk.

Oafans and Oisri

• Were the ancient Oafans using Oisri, or did they have their own way of making Pa'anurii?
  • The Oafans make no mention of Oisri, so it likely belonged to a different civilization. Their worldforge was the one the espees were camped on.
    • Not arguing them not mentioning it, but this worldforge was only using captive Pa'anurii, it sounded like they were brewed somewhere else. Though Oafans could have their own brewery somewhere else lost and/or destroyed.
  • Book 20 Prologue says that many galaxy-spanning civilizations figured out how to brew dark-matter constructs sooner or later, so there're bound to be some pieces of that tech lying around. Although Oafa used similar in description method of preserving information in hard surfaces, so it might indeed belong to them specifically.

Captain Landon's Prosthetics

• In a universe where characters regularly regrow limbs and whole bodies (Elf's legs; Chef, in recent instalments; Kevyn Andreysan) why does Captain Landon keep his prosthetic arm, and the plate on his head?
  • He's Tenzy's personal custom build-a-bear, so it must be a sign of affection - it's clearly stated their feelings are mutual. It also seems they aren't just prosthetics, but cybernetic enhancements Deus-Ex-style.
  • It's heavily implied that those are parts of Tenzy, as well.

Hypernode principles

• Was it stated anywhere how do they work, besides "perfect unless jammed"?
  • It does seem that, in small part, that you need to know a procedure to connect two nodes (either 'frequency' or 'network protocol'); the one they had (that the crayon drawings were about) had instructions on how to repair it to connect it to others of its type....
    • So, basically, perfect unless jammed.

Kreely Slavers' Bank Account

• None of the math related to this mission adds up at all. Legs states here that the money she drained from the Kreely's bank account would be enough to retire on for her alone, but only two weeks pay spread across the whole company... except we know, at this point, that the Toughs only comprise about a hundred people, so two weeks pay would be roughly equivalent to 4 years for Legs alone- a tidy sum, but hardly "enough to retire on". Even assuming the officers are paid far more than grunts like Legs, there just aren't enough of them to make that math work out.
• Furthermore, the employers later noted that they paid Tagon ten times what the entire business of the slavers was worth, because they assumed that they could do what Legs did and drain their bank accounts and break even. How exactly were the slavers going to have ten times the value of their own business in their bank accounts? And if that figure really was roughly equally to what the Toughs were paid, why do Tagon and Brad act at the start of the arc like they've struck the jackpot, when in fact they were getting paid just about enough to make payroll for another two weeks?
  • 10x to buy them outright? 10x what they would make in a certain period of time? If it's "buy outright", well there are companies that are on stock exchanges, where to buy all of their 'outstanding' stock at once, at current prices, would be considerably more than their annual income/sales.

Pa'anuri language

• Petey spent countless cycles of his thinking facilities to learn Pa'anuri language. Schlock converses with them without any trouble, in Galstandard, apparently. Is this acceptable break from, er, comic reality to smooth the action, or am I missing something? Also on that note, since when they call themselves "Pa'anuri"? It's a Ganni word, while they used simply "US" before.
  • With the exception of translating "US" to Pa'anuri? It's probable that Schlock learned how to talk with them simply by the fact that they are delicious, and nutritious...or because that got knocked into his brain during the stuff leading to his ascension. (Them calling themselves Pa'anuri is an error, though)

Der Trihs' brain

• He was stuffed in a magic cryokit early on, and it could even connect an AI to a meat-frame. How didn't it even point at his botched brain surgery? Good doctor was on the team and instructed the kit to keep silent?
  • Botched in such a way, or long enough ago, that it looked like natural brain damage? Der Trihs wouldn't/couldn't think to ask for an "enhancement" that would restore his original abilities; and Tagon probably felt like not asking for a restoration to help keep the cover story intact.

Core Capacitor and hasteful decisions

• Why Petey was in such a hurry to send his telescope and Pursuing Dinosaurs outside the galaxy he drained his capacitor completely? Pa'anuri incursion and everything that actually required them to hurry happened exactly because he drained it in the first place. While Oafans were putting some pressure on him and Pa'anuri would think of something nasty in the end anyway, and due to sensor cloud he had to deploy the ship immediately after the telescope, both could wait until he charged a second one (or even made it) to not be left with his bare furry butt to defend the galaxy with.
  • Oops, completely forgot about walking the shots with the long gun. Ok, he WAS in a hurry.

Evacuating the Plenipotent Dominion

• When Petey moved (and stripped of annie plants) all of his cities, Kevyn took great care not to reveal their new location even to allies, on the chance that this information could reach the Pa'anuri. However, with 30th century sensor and computing technology, a location fix can be found just by looking at the starfield, which is why background stars need to be removed from images to keep locations secret. Yet Parnassus Dom still gives its inhabitants and visitors a clear view of the stars, and those visitors are allowed to leave (where Petey cannot easily control their communications). That seems to be a pretty glaring oversight when the lives of millions are on the line...
  • I agree.
  • We know that all windows are smart windows. Maybe he just programmed them to show the old view from before he moved the cities? Including the part where they're spun, because it's a very sophisticated program.

Uploading the Oafans

• Why did the Oafans need to receive a hasty emergency Brain Uploading? They were already in hiding, and Annie plants were shutdown, so it couldn't be the Paanuri or the long gun. Was it The Evils of Free Will or what?
  • Whatever it is, it's something that Iafa found sufficiently compelling. While the Oafa is much less advanced as a people, it's basically the same choice that All-Star made for themselves, as well as a whole lot of others.

Counting Schlocks (in the final arc)

• So: Schlock ends up controlling a separate Dark Matter body, in a case of 'one mind, two bodies'. During the events, one of his bodies goes through a teraport (I think; its been awhile since I've reread the arc), and I ended up with the impression that this would sever the connection between them. Since both continue to have an impact on the story, would this mean there are now two distinct Schlocks in the universe?
  • There are, but not for the reasons you think. Teraports destroy metastable dark matter, which is why the dronuri exist: to allow Pa'anuri to be "restored from backup". The first teraport, and every teraport thereafter, destroyed Schlock's dark matter body, reverting him to his baryonic form and reinvigorating his appetite for dark matter. After all was said and done, Schlock had taken control of the Milky Way Core and only then split into baryonic! and non-baryonic!Schlock, a fact which is explicitly brought up in the epilogue - although I'm not sure why Tayler felt the need to make it happen.

Pedey

• Non-native English speaker here. How do you get "Petey" from PDCL? Isn't it pronounced "pee-dee-see-el"? NSB drops half the word and mangles the rest, despite being perfect at pronunciation.

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